


First Base

by Dien



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Baseball, Fluff, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-09
Updated: 2013-05-09
Packaged: 2017-12-10 21:27:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/790342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dien/pseuds/Dien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finch buys Fusco and his son baseball tickets. That's pretty much it. Could be gen, could be slashy if you squint.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First Base

**Author's Note:**

  * For [livenudebigfoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/livenudebigfoot/gifts).



“Detective, your assistance is needed. I'm sending map coordinates to your phone, if you'll proceed there--”

Fusco's brain is somewhere way-the-hell else when Finch calls (and doesn't even say hello) so it takes him like six seconds to process that Finch means _now_ , and his mouth goes before his brain does:

“Oh _fuck_ no. _No._ Not today, you assholes, I'm off for the day and--” 

“It was not a request, detective,” Finch says, his voice so sharp and strident that Fusco's teeth click shut before he gives them permission to do so.

There's fear in Finch's voice: controlled and taut as piano wire, but Fusco knows the sound so he keeps his mouth shut and grinds down on his anger and listens to what it is he has to do.

He has to call his Ex while he's en route to the meatpacking plant which is Reese's last known location, has to tell her while he's fuckin' breaking traffic laws that nope, he can't make it after all, that yeah, he fuckin' _knows_ Lee's gonna be broke up about it, that she's welcome to fuckin' use the game tickets if she wants but it's an emergency, he's a cop, those happen, remember? and he has to listen to her telling him all about how he's damn right she _remembers_ and you know what, Lionel, why don't you tell Lee yourself that you're not coming, here, I'll put him on for you--

So it's really kind of a relief that he has to end the call on account of gunfire, on account of these motherfuckin' Russians taking potshots at his car as he careens into their parking lot with his tires skidding on gravel and his cellphone dropping to the floor as he fumbles for the gun instead. Yeah. Kinda.

It's way past Lee's bedtime when things calm back down enough for him to try returning the call. Fusco leans against his car door with his shoulder hurting and his jaw scraped and throbbing and looks down at his cell phone, which lists three missed calls, none of which are from the Ex.

He'll make it up to Lee. Sure. Somehow. Tomorrow.

Reese drives off on a stolen motorcycle without so much as an asshole 'hey, thanks Lionel' _,_ or bothering to tell him what he should do with the unconscious and/or bleeding Russians.

“Thanks, Lionel, you're a stand-up guy,” Fusco he says to the parking lot and the nearest Russian. “You helped us out in a jam today, Fusco, good job buddy.”

He can't imitate Reese's stupid soft scary fucker voice so he gives up trying. He tries Finch's but it comes out like bad Masterpiece Theatre or some shit, like fake-British.

Whatever.

Fusco goes home and turns on the game in time to see the Mets losing.

Yeah, he thinks; that's about right.

*****

In all truthfulness (and Fusco supposes it doesn't say anything too great about him, that he's so used to those few nice things in his life that he plans for getting railroaded), he's kinda forgotten about the thing with the Russians and the rest of that evening when the tickets arrive.

It's been a week, okay, and it's been a week with several dead bodies and the usual Simmons-breathing-down-his-neck and him and Carter needing to run interference on some _other_ shit Reese got up to, so, hey. What's one missed baseball game?

The tickets arrive in an envelope with no return address, so that should probably be his first clue. He grunts at the envelope made out in neat script to _Det. Lionel Fusco_ and tears it open before he thinks to himself, _hey, maybe I should have the bomb guys sniff this thing for anthrax or whatever._

No white powder, though, just tickets, baseball game tickets, Mets tickets, and he looks at them dumbly because they're not just baseball tickets and they're not just Mets tickets, they're _season tickets,_ like, the entire season, and it so happens that Lionel Fusco knows how much they cost because once, late at night, he'd priced them out in one of those 'if I ever win the lottery' moments you get up to when browsing the Internet.

Technically speaking there's tiers. Like, cheap nosebleed season tickets will set you back sixteen-hundred bucks, which is a chunk of change but the sort of thing that if he were better at managing his money he could probably actually afford. On the other end of the spectrum, you got the fancy box seats, that's ten grand, which is what you buy if you're playing the Lottery Fantasy Game in your head at one a.m. while eating leftover Chinese.

These aren't the box seats. These are Delta Club, which is a little cheaper than the box but not by a whole lot, but happens to be pretty close to field level and pretty close to right behind the plate. It's still in the area of 'ten percent of Lionel Fusco's annual income'.

He knows who sent them, of course: who the fuck else?

For a stupid moment he actually wonders _How'd he know?_ and then remembers he's talking about Finch here. Finch probably knows how many freckles he's got on his goddamn ass. And Finch listens to his calls, so probably heard every word he said with the Ex.

(And Fusco supposes it doesn't say anything too great about him that he's no longer angered by that, either. It's just there. It's just par for the course of his life.)

On the inside flap of the envelope there's Finch's neat script: _Sorry to have ruined your evening, Detective._

Finch stuffs the tickets back into the envelope before Carter or anyone else can see.

***

He goes to four games with Lee using the tickets. And Lionel Fusco knows better than to think this _fixes_ anything, that this suddenly makes him a Good Dad and excuses all the nights where he wasn't there, and he knows from his own childhood that the ledger book doesn't magically come out into the positive now (kids remember shit, kids remember the _damndest_ shit about how their old man has fucked up), but, but, the point is, it's something.  
  
It's something: Lee loves the games and they eat expensive hot dogs and even the Ex doesn't give him more than a sigh when they get home from the games at ten, eleven o'clock. A mutter about _bedtime_ but she sees Lee's happy, glowing, sleepy face and that's all she gives him, a mutter.

The game nights are oases from the daily shit, islands of good that he clings to jealously. It's some miracle of fucking luck that his shifts wind up being such that he has each of the games free, and maybe he ought to be looking up for the anvil that'll come in hand with this good fortune, but Lionel just says _Okay, God, I guess I'm getting a little bit of a break, thanks._ _Nah, really, thanks. I'll, uh, I'll go to Mass this Sunday._

He uses his cell phone to take pictures of Lee at the games: Lee on his feet screaming at the pitcher just like his old man does, Lee with chili beans on his face, Lee happy, because these are talismans for the bad nights. They are golden, they are pure, they sit next to his heart closer than his badge.

Better even than the games, better than the expensive seats, are the rides to and from. Picking his son up at school, listening to him talk all the way to Citi Field (it ain't no Shea but hell, the seats are better), what he's studying, who his friends are, this girl he kinda likes, all the stupid, normal, clean, golden shit.

It's good. It's good, and he thinks to himself, _I gotta remember to thank Finch,_ except every time that the phone rings Finch is in no mood for small talk. It's crisis, crisis, crisis. It's bomb vests or it's poison in the water or it's drug runners-- Fusco's dimly aware that their lives have gotten (somehow) crazier, and he's peripherally involved, but only peripherally.

He goes to the games, and he says _thanks_ in his head.

It comes as a stupid splash of cold water the first time Lee can't go to one of the games.

“I told you two weeks ago we were headed to my mother's for the weekend,” the Ex says on the phone, and Fusco has no memory of this but that doesn't mean she's lying; it's more likely he was grunting and nodding along while his mind was on the bruise on his shoulder from the most recent time Simmons has shoved him into a wall.

He says something like, _oh, okay,_ and there's a few beats of awkward silence (she's in the kitchen, he can hear pots and pans and he has a memory of her chicken marsala that hits him like a truck, all those treacherous brain cells flashing him the remembrance of dinners years ago, savory, oregano--)

\--few beats of silence and then she asks, and this is maybe the gentlest and most apologetic he's heard her voice to him in four years:

“Can you... get a refund on the tickets for the night?”

Because, of course, she doesn't know he's got _season tickets,_ because that would be unthinkable for the man she left, because she doesn't know he's not the one footing the bill.

“Don't worry about it,” he hears himself say, “I can probably pop 'em to some buddies of mine,” and he tells her _drive safe_ and hangs up.

He had been three minutes from her apartment. So now Lionel drives around Queens for about ten minutes before saying, eh, hell with it. He has the night off. He'll go to the game. He'll have a beer or three, which he doesn't do when Lee's there with him.

Another flash of memory, stinging worse than marsala wine in a cut: two years ago, Stills would have been the guy he'd call to see if he wants to catch the game.

That's right out, cuz he don't got a ouija board.

Fusco stares out the windshield and thinks about friends. Most of his life, he's been one of a pack: he's had his guys, he knew who they were. Lionel's always been good at getting on with people, last year of his life notwithstanding: he's not captain of the football team, but goddamn if he ain't _on the team._ Lionel's a stand-up fucking guy, yeah, he's got a place.

Had, now. Had a place, had his boys.

Half of 'em are dead now, the other half in lock-up. That hatchet-faced bastard Simmons is still around but Jesus no he's not a friend, he has _never_ been a friend. He was too high up the chain when Lionel was in with HR to be anything but a 'boss'; his _friend_ had been Stills.

Who's he got now? Who's his pack? The answer comes, and makes him laugh with a hand on his belly cuz it kinda hurts: Carter, yeah. Sure, Carter. Carter, who he's always trying to be _worthy_ of. Carter's his _partner_ , a title more sacred and laden than just friend.

He'll lie for Carter, and he'll throw himself in front of a bullet for Carter, any day of the week. He's pretty sure she'd do the same for him. What they have is sealed in blood.

And he still doesn't want to drink three beers in front of her, wary of the judgment he might find in her eyes.

Finch and Reese. Are they his _friends?_ Jesus, he needs better friends. Ones that don't nearly get him killed once a week. Ones that he doesn't have a history of attempted murder with, or eavesdropping.

He tries to imagine Reese at a baseball game. Lurking. Those eyes of his can be dead as fuck when he goes to whatever scary killer place he calls home: dead and flat and tracking threats and who's packing. Guy might fucking shoot the umpire.

Finch is funnier. Finch at a game is way funnier, is fastidiously wiping his fingers of mustard with a napkin and bitching about the noise.

Fuck it. He'll go alone. You gotta learn to like your own company, or something.

***

Six bucks a beer. Fusco carries twelve dollars worth of beer in his hands to his seat. Even without his son it beats being home in his apartment alone, right? Right.

The pre-game excitement's in the air, guys selling cotton candy and peanuts and sunflower seeds. Fusco thinks of his own dad, eight years dead. Jack Fusco had been a Giants fan, and most of Lionel's baseball memories of his father consist of the old man railing at the Giants for the fucking betrayal of betrayals to move across country and abandon the faithful.

Willie Mays jersey, he remembers that. His dad had had one. Pretty nearly burned it in anger, too, but money had won out: he thinks it got sold instead, but the memory's fuzzy. 

The beer's cold. It tastes good. There's a family of five in the seats ahead of him, a blond-headed kid of like three years old bouncing up and down in his seat and ignoring his mother's repeated words to sit still. _POPcorn, getcha pop-corn! Five dollahs, getcha pop-corn!_

Maybe he should've asked Carter, he thinks. Maybe she wouldn't have looked twice at him regarding the beer, maybe he's projecting his own guilt, hell, maybe she'd have had a beer too. 

On the heels of that thought comes another: _no way can he ask her._ Because she'll realize the seats are too good, too expensive, that he can't afford them, and she'll want to know how, how how how, even if she doesn't say it aloud she'll want to know, and it's worse if she doesn't ask because then maybe she's thinking it's something bad, some bribe or some shady shit-- 

Lionel leans back in his seat with one beer in each cupholder and presses his palms into his eye sockets until it hurts. He lets out a breath. Whose bright idea was this, anyway?

“Is this seat taken, Detective?”

He about gives himself whiplash. If he'd had a beer in hand he would have spilled it.

“Jesus,” he snaps at Finch, who's standing there (with the dog in a bright orange service vest), one hand holding a thing of cotton candy, and a half-smile on his face.

Finch takes that as a 'no', and smiles a little more, all smug-pleased, and shuffles forward to claim the seat.

Despite himself he's a little relieved. He'll bitch about it-- he'll bitch about them taking up one of his few nights off-- but the prospect of having something to do tonight, some place they need him to be or someone who needs protective custody or whatever-- it's better than sitting here watching baseball alone.

Finch eases himself down into the seat. “ _Zit,_ Bear. What do you think of the view, Detective? I admit I'm more accustomed to the box seats, but I thought Lee might appreciate something closer to the action.”

Oh. Yeah. He never did say thank you. Fusco rubs at the back of his neck.

“ 's good. He loves it. You, uh, you didn't have to get these.”

“Of course I didn't have to,” Finch says as he settles back in the seat and carefully pulls a piece of blue cotton candy from the multi-colored blob in his hand. “But you've made sacrifices in our... partnership. I believe good deeds should, ever so often, be rewarded.”

Aw jeez, is he blushing? Fuckin' _A_. Fusco looks away before Finch can see it.

“Yeah, alright. I don't-- I don't help you guys for crap like this, though.”

“No. You don't. If you were motivated by such mercenary tactics, rest assured I would _not_ have gotten you tickets.”

Fusco waves a hand to dismiss this logic. “I'm trying to say 'thank you', here.”

“Ah.” Finch smiles a little, again, and proffers the cotton candy. “You're welcome?”

Fusco looks from the spun sugar to Finch's face.

Finch has on a hat, a fedora or whatever, and a Mets scarf, blue-and-orange. It's brighter than the stuff he usually wears, and Fusco has a moment of-- it's not quite _pride_ , it's more amusement than anything, but there's a weird little curl of _heh_ in his belly-- at the thought that Finch goes and buys a fuckin' Mets scarf just to blend in, to come to the stadium, for the sole sake of fetching one Lionel Fusco to go do some illicit shit for him.

He's worth a scarf. That's cool.

Fusco shrugs and reaches out for some of the cotton candy. The pink stuff. The yellow, the banana, that crap is nasty.

The announcer's getting going with the pre-game stuff and Fusco puts the sugar into his mouth to let it dissolve (while the killing-dog looks up all wistful, big eyes like he thinks Fusco's gonna give him any. _You're on your own there, sport_.)

He thinks that Finch looks kinda tired. Behind the glasses his bug-eyes are a little red, and there's a tight pinched look to the skin around his nose and mouth. _Their crazy lives,_ he thinks, and not for the first time Lionel's glad that the burden of their knowledge is not on him. However it is they know what they know. Whether Peck was right, or nutso. He's just glad he's not the one being given names and having to live with ' _if you don't do something, this person dies'_ because Lionel has been offered that choice plenty in his life already and he has a long history of failing that choice, of turning a blind eye, of closing his eyes entirely.

Just as well it's not on him, except for times like today when they call him up and tell him, _go do this, go here, get this, save this person, no, you don't have a choice_ (thank God, thank God he doesn't have a choice, because if he doesn't have a choice he can't make the wrong one).

Come to think of it, why _is_ Finch here, and not calling him? He steals another glance at Finch's face, but Finch isn't looking at him; Finch is watching the field.

He frowns and scans the crowd for Reese's Grim Reaper figure, eyes darting to the places where you'd put eyes on the crowd-- just behind the last aisle of seats, or in the semi-concealment of the support columns-- but no man in a coat or a suit jumps out at him. He looks back to Finch, leans sideways to him, lowers his voice.

“It's someone here?”

Finch cranes his way with that awkward torso twist he does and blinks his pale, watery eyes at him. “I'm sorry?”

“Your vic, or your perp-- it's someone here at the game?”

Finch blinks a second time and then his expression clears. He smiles, a brittle and tired smile. “I'm sorry, I should have clarified there's no emergency. Nobody's in trouble, Detective.” He almost looks like he's about to say more, but gives a small shake of his head _no_ to punctuate his words and that's that.

“...oh,” says Fusco, and sits back straight in his seat again, his brain scrambling for conversational footage.

 _So... what are you doing here?_ he thinks, but how to ask that without coming off kind of an ass?

“...so... what are you doing here?”

He watches Finch gingerly, slowly, lean back into the cushions of the Delta Club chairs. Finch stares out at the field, at green grass and red-brown earth; Finch tips his head back a few degrees and darts his eyes sideways, not at Fusco but at something Fusco doesn't see. Finch plucks another wad of cotton candy from the mass and holds it between thumb and forefinger, peering at it.

“Decompressing,” he says at last, “by watching a baseball game, Detective.”

Fusco's not sure what to do with that, so he picks up his right-hand beer and takes a long gulp from it. Their crazy lives, yeah-- and his weather-sense tells him it's gotten crazier, that there's blood in the water somewhere. Carter would ask what's wrong, Fusco thinks. He won't.

“Rough week?” is all he hazards, and Finch just nods.

“...if you'd rather I didn't intrude--” he says after a second, and Fusco shakes his head quickly because his mouth's full of beer. He swallows it down, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Shit, no, it's cool. You _bought_ the tickets, you can do whatever you want. Lee-- my kid-- he's outta town, so, uh--”

By Finch's small, unsurprised nod, he gets that Finch knows that, that Finch wouldn't have come if he didn't know that, and Fusco wonders, not for the first time, just how constantly Finch does eavesdrop on him. Then he wonders if it's coincidence that he's had game days off.

“So,” he asks before the silence can get too weird, “this is what you do in your downtime? When you aren't saving people? You catch a Mets game, you eat a hot dog?”

“I'm eating cotton candy,” Finch answers, and overhead the speakers boom to life with the music so loud it rattles your bones.

He offers Finch the left-hand beer, the red plastic cup sweating in his fingers, and Finch looks at it a long time, then looks up at Fusco over the rims of his glasses.

“What do you want, Chardonnay?” Fusco half-shouts over the sounds of _Take Me Out to the Ballgame._ Finch gives him a small, crooked smile, and reaches out to take the cup, his fingers bumping against Fusco's.

“Thank you, Detective; beer will be perfectly satisfactory.”


End file.
